At night on 19 Nov, approximately 75 (non)students from the New School, NYU, CUNY, and other university-factories in NYC marched from Washington to Union Squares and back in a gesture of solidarity with the wave of occupations that has swept the University of California system in response to the 32% tuition hike, budget cuts, and the reproduction of students as consumer-commodities ready to work for spectacle-subjects. The march saw crazy hooligans hanging banners off of buildings; masked rogues scattering trashcans, newspaper boxes and plastic barricades across Fifth Avenue; sexy dancing throughout the streets an attempted occupation of a Parsons art party as well as the good ol’ 65 5th ave. Unfortunately, the fun ended when cops managed to pierce the motley mob, arresting two after beating them on the sidewalk. This was caught on film: watch here

The two arrested were taken to the 6th Precint in the West Village, where much of the crowd ended up at the end of the night, dancing and singing out front, distributing pamphlets and glow sticks, and remaining until the two walked free.

On November 19th we marched in solidarity with the occupiers in California reclaiming their universities in Santa Cruz, UCLA, Fresno, and Davis. While students are generally considered privileged members of society many of us will graduate deeply in debt and forced to integrate into a culture more alienating and atomized then ever before. At the New School and NYU we occupied both to protest these conditions and to unleash the tactic of occupation in hopes that it will become generalized, spreading from the universities to the factories, homes facing eviction, forests to be clearcut, and anywhere space is being stolen from the commons. Occupation is a particularly effective tactic because it is both historically venerated by liberals after its historical use in student and labor movements, and affirms the very un-liberal principles of hatred of authority and private property. As we reclaim space authority reveals its usually hidden violent face. For taking whats ours: the streets, the schools, the factories, the land, we will be beaten, gassed, and incarcerated. In the face of cop beating a student we see the violence that underlies the normality of capitalist existence. When we expose this violence and resist it head on we learn to resist more effectively, to create an affinity amongst the disposed, to open spaces for action and meaningful politics, to shift the weapon of crisis from their hands to ours.